


Hungry Ice

by ncfan



Series: Legendarium Ladies April [31]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen, Horror, Inspired by an element of The Magnus Archives, POV Female Character, Third Age, Tumblr: legendariumladiesapril, Umbar, legendarium ladies april
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-24 07:20:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18566617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: The life of a Quenya scholar in Umbar in the Third Age was not a particularly riveting one. Adûnakali had found herself shunted sideways into her university's history department, and there she gathered dust, teaching Quenya to small classes of unenthusiastic students. But one winter, something interesting fell into her hands.





	Hungry Ice

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Legendarium Ladies April 8th [picture prompt](), ‘Books.’
> 
> This fic is set early in the Third Age, after Gondor started harboring imperial ambitions regarding Umbar, but before the reign of Tarannon Falastur in Gondor.

It was rare, these days, for the university to have a donation that had come to it by sea. Gondor had been growing increasingly aggressive over the years, eyeing Umbar less like a neighboring kingdom and more as a potential conquest, and a consequence of that was that legitimate sea trade of all kinds was suffering. Piracy and smuggling still managed to thrive, and it was with some shame that Adûnakali was made to admit that there had been years when nearly all of the trade goods that had entered into the city via the port had been goods carried in by corsairs or smugglers fleeing the warships of Gondor. The price of having neighbors with imperial ambitions, though unless the Men of Gondor proved as fond of burning books as they were of killing sailors, Adûnakali suspected her life would not change overmuch.

Having to transport imported food over land as opposed to sea was a hardship, of course. Adûnakali felt much more keenly the fact that she had had no new materials to review or research in the past five years. The Royal University was being put in a chokehold, and no, Adûnakali did not consider that an exaggeration. She especially was in a _stranglehold_ , for materials for her area of specialization and greatest passion almost never saw arrival into the city by anywhere but by sea. No new materials, and all there was for her to do was try to teach Quenya to small classes of unenthusiastic, sometimes outright contemptuous students, and that was when class was actively in session.

The university had broken for the winter a week ago, and Adûnakali was already beginning to feel as a leopard caged in the king’s menagerie. Her cage was not a cage, but a small office secreted in the back of the history department.

Ah. There had been some debate as to whether a Quenya scholar and (by necessity) professor should be housed in the linguistics department of the history department. Adûnakali herself had lobbied for placement in the linguistics department—it _did_ make sense. But her pleas had gone unheard, and she was classified as a member of the history department, instead. She wasn’t entirely certain why, but harbored some dark suspicions related to the current state of affairs regarding foreign relations.

That she had almost certainly been shunted sideways might explain why her office was, or at least she suspected it was, once a storage closet of some kind. That would be the most likely explanation for, well, everything about her office. Why, instead of the elaborately painted tile floors, the floor of her office was rough stone. Why the walls were unpainted. Why it was so much smaller than all of the offices the other professors in the history department had been allotted, and why the only window was small and narrow. Adûnakali suspected a very specific sort of message, one directed to her personally. She had heard it. She wasn’t going to heed it.

Adûnakali had taken a rug she had bought a few years prior out of the personal quarters assigned to her and laid it down on the floor to compensate for the lack of glossy, fired tiles. That did not manage to erase the fact that her office was so cramped as to have room for a small writing desk and a single bookcase (and this far from full; Adûnakali’s wages were not the most extravagant in the world), and not much else.

Adûnakali’s one pleasure as regards to her office was the window overlooking the university gardens. Though there was not much set aside for a Quenya scholar, the university spared no expense keeping the gardens lush and fertile, even during the most unforgiving months of summer. Deep in the winter as it was now, the gardens were not the riot of color they were in spring or early summer, but the cedar trees still provided the gardens with a splash of color and a fresh scent that wafted up to Adûnakali’s open window when the breeze was strong enough.

And as the smell of cedar reached her at her desk, Adûnakali looked up from paperwork to the window, a slice of sky a pale, milky blue tinted with gray, and sighed. Maybe she should take her paperwork down to the gardens. At the very least, she’d be more likely to encounter one of her colleagues, a student conducting winter studies, a maid, _anyone_ down there. Her office was, after all, rather out of the way. She didn’t encounter people back here overmuch, not unless they were looking for her specifically.

Just as Adûnakali was starting to gather up her papers, a thundering of running footfalls sounded in the hall outside. Adûnakali looked up, startled, as Lujayn, one of the scholars attached to the linguistics department, appeared at the door, panting and reaching up to readjust her askew headdress. Her dark eyes glimmered with something close to frenzy as they lit on Adûnakali’s face. “Ah…” She sucked in a breath, holding up a hand for quiet as she did so. “There you are, Adûnakali. I’ve been looking all over for you.”

“Where else would I have been?” Never mind that this corridor of offices was usually nearly empty between semesters.

“Well, you certainly weren’t _home_. Or at your favorite teahouse. Or the library.”

So Lujayn really had been looking all over. With some concern, Adûnakali asked her, “Why have you been looking for me? Is something wrong?”

A sharp shake of the head, another rush to right her freshly-askew headdress, a stiff box-like blue cap with a trim of interlocking white and yellow triangles, and a pale blue silk scarf spilling out from under it, draped loosely about the neck and shoulders. Other Haradrim women never seemed to have trouble with such headdresses, but Lujayn nearly always had. The sight of her struggles made Adûnakali grateful she wasn’t obliged to cover her hair, for any reason. “No, not exactly?” She shrugged helplessly. “A ship’s made port in harbor, and it’s—“ She approached the desk and tugged on Adûnakali’s sleeve. “Just come and see it. Before someone tries to take it away.”

Whatever it was, it was probably not nearly as interesting as Lujayn seemed to believe. Oh, well. It got Adûnakali out of the office, at least. “Alright. Just let me get my shawl. It’s cold out there.”

Lujayn, who wore no shawl, stole, or cloak over her long blue tunic or trousers (admittedly, both were made of heavier material than what she typically wore in warm weather), raised an eyebrow. “You know, I’ve never understood that. You’re one of the Adûnaim, but you always seem so sensitive to the cold. More so than I am.”

“It’s different for everyone, Lujayn.” Adûnakali tucked her soft, woolen shawl, a deep maroon embroidered with images of white lilies, close about her shoulders. The fringe was starting to look a little ratty. She’d have to do something about that. “Besides which, my family isn’t so inbred that all of its members look as if they sprang from the same set of parents. My blood is not fully Adûnaim.”

“I know.” Lujayn’s shadow was elongated and distorted as they headed down the hallways for the staircase, flickering whenever they passed by one of the many windows with their panes of stained glass, cut into quavering shards of green and red and golden. “It’s just that, to hear it, the Adûnaim are supposed to be nearly as inhuman in some regards as the Elves. You’re actually feeling the cold has never ceased to throw me.”

“Well, I’m just as human as you are. Sorry to disappoint,” Adûnakali said dryly.

The grounds of the Royal University were somewhat labyrinthine in nature, to the point that those who were unfamiliar with them grew lost easily, and the guards had been instructed to double as guides to visitors and new students. Adûnakali and Lujayn had both been here some years, however, though Adûnakali was decidedly the more senior of the two, and they had no issue traversing the series of staircases and footpaths, roads and buildings that would take them to the outer walls. As they walked their path, they encountered few people, aside from the occasional guard. Adûnakali bit back a sigh. After the semester, she had needed some rest, but she had never liked how empty the campus was when the students were away.

“So…” Adûnakali eyed Lujayn, who with her shorter legs was struggling to keep pace with her. “Your first semester properly teaching students instead of just engaging in pure research. How was it?”

Sometimes, Adûnakali wondered whether she would have been even remotely drawn to Lujayn’s company if not for their somewhat similar circumstances. One of them, the only scholar in the university who specialized in Quenya. The other, the only scholar in the university who specialized in Sindarin as written using the Cirth alphabet, as opposed to Tengwar. Lujayn wasn’t pushed to the margins quite as Adûnakali was, but one could hardly deny that her younger colleague wasn’t allowed fully into the sun, and that did engender some sympathy. Adûnakali knew, for instance, that the well of new materials to sink her teeth into had been running dry for Lujayn these past several years, just as it had been for her.

Lujayn rolled her eyes. “It… was.”

“That doesn’t sound all that cheery.”

“Well…” Lujayn let out with a huff of a bitter laugh that reverberated around the courtyard, the second-to-last they must needs traverse before reaching the outer wall of the university. “I don’t know if it’s some sort of tradition to give a first-term professor an awful crop of students—“

“I’ve certainly had my suspicions about that.”

“—My class this semester certainly made me wonder.” Lujayn jabbed her forehead with her fingertips. “I think that all of them must have been raised in caves. By wolves. Cave wolves?” She twisted her lips a little before going on, “I had one who insisted on tracking mud all over the floor; how he still had fresh mud on his shoes by the time he reached my classroom is beyond me. Another one liked to _spit_ on the floor.”

Adûnakali felt a spasm of disgust shoot up her spine. “ _Ugh_. Was it just saliva, or had they been chewing naswar?”

Lujayn’s round face was locked in an expression torn between revulsion and misery. “It depended on the day.”

“ _Yeurgh._ ”

“And they were dull as old knives, too. I had to explain how lenition works to those clods so many times that by the end of it, _I_ was forgetting how lenition works.”

“Always a pleasant feeling. Reminds me of, hmm, I think it was four semesters back, when I was made to take on a student who had gotten in purely on account of her family’s wealth.” Adûnakali had forgotten her name. As far as she was concerned, that was for the best. “It was patently obvious from her first day that she had no desire to be in my classroom; speaking with her other professors confirmed that she had no desire to be in the university in general. From what I understand, she had been cultivating a career as a socialite, and regarded the education her parents demanded of her as nothing but a distraction.”

Oh, how Adûnakali hated students such as her. She’d had more than one over the years she had found herself obliged to teach, rather than simply devote herself to pure research, and each one of them had been a trial from which she had derived no lesson except in how to hold her tongue, the better to avoid angering wealthy parents (Who occasionally turned out, quite problematically, to be patrons of the university). If she was to suffer all other indignities, she could at least have students who were actually committed to learning the material she meant to teach.

They were nearing the gate, now. The city was ancient, predating the strongholds of Gondor—Osgiliath, Minas Anor, and Minas Ithil—by some centuries, and this university had not always been a university. Adûnakali was minded of that past every time she came to stand before the walls of the university, soaring towards the sky with battlements, arrow slits, the whole works. She was reminded every time she stood before the gates, which stood open now, but when shut required the use of a heavy, clanking mechanism to open, for by hand it took nigh on twenty young, strong men to do the same job.

“Needless to say,” Adûnakali murmured, as they crossed the threshold and put the university behind them. “There’s nothing rewarding about students like that. They’re wont to suck all the joy out of the classroom.”

Within the university, there had been quiet, and the constant trammel of walls had muted the power of the wind. Without, it was as if a spell had been broken, and Adûnakali was hit with all the sounds and smells of a large, coastal city at once. And the wind. That frigid, salt-soaked wind made short work of Adûnakali’s shawl, cutting through fabric to grow and claw at her flesh. Adûnakali winced and drew her shawl closer about her, for all the good that did.

There was a perch atop the public library and archive that was popular for sight-seeing; it soon became clear that Lujayn was steering them towards there. They passed a soaper’s store with its… _distinctive_ smell, and a few food stalls with their own distinctive, significantly more pleasant smells. (The fatayer and baqlawa stands reminded Adûnakali that she hadn’t eaten in hours; her stomach growled to remind her further, and she resolved to stop at a stall on her way back to the university.)

“Did you hear they’re opening another restaurant near the courthouse?”

“Oh? It’s not going to be like that one that served ‘genuine Rhovanion meals,’ is it? Stars, the food there was vile.”

“No, I don’t think so. The owners of the property are supposed to be from Khand, so maybe it’ll be Khandian food? That sounds good, doesn’t it?”

Adûnakali shrugged discontentedly. (Her stomach growled. She should not have let herself be drawn into a conversation about food.) “I don’t know. I don’t care much for mare’s milk.”

“Where would anyone even _get_ mare’s milk here?” Lujayn pointed out. “That’s something rich people do. If there’s any milk in that place, it’s going to be goat milk, not mare’s.”

“I suppose you have a point. And so long as mare’s milk does _not_ make an appearance, I think I would be willing to at least give the place a hearing.”

If it ever opened. Adûnakali recalled promises of a soup shop, a restaurant set up by refugees from Nurn, and a confectionary’s shop, scattered about in the past like the shards of a broken pot. None of them had ever properly materialized into existence, much to Adûnakali’s frustration. Her own meager skills in the kitchen were not nearly enough to keep most of the meals she made herself from being mind-numbingly boring, and though she had a number of inexpensive teahouses and coffee houses and food stalls and restaurants she liked to eat at, rates at the restaurants of quality were too high for her to eat at them often. All she wanted was some kunāfa that didn’t have the consistency of glue. She couldn’t make that in her own kitchen.

The wind picked up as Adûnakali and Lujayn mounted the ramp up towards the top of the combined library and archive. Adûnakali’s shawl was even more useless now than before. All she could do was fight to keep it from being ripped from her shoulders; her shawl would have looked very pretty adorning a spire or the head of a statue, but she preferred it stay right where she was. Lujayn was huffing and puffing beside her, one hand clamped down on her box-like cap and the other gliding over the metal rail flecked with spots of rust. The wind had raised patches of chapped red on her tawny cheeks. Adûnakali’s long black braid was whipped back and forth, and by the time they reached the top, her scalp was stinging and tender. She could barely feel her fingers; her ear lobes throbbed.

The sky had turned.  Adûnakali was confronted with an eternity of icy gray from the sightseers’ perch made from the broad, flat roof of this venerable old building. It was that smooth, swirling gray that made it very difficult even for one with the keen eyes of the Adûnaim to tell if it was the actual sky, or if it was a sea of clouds to match the sea of water that also stretched off into eternity. The sun shone white and hazy, its light diffused and glowing like a lamp lit in the middle of a field, where there was too much light to compete with for the lamplight to make much of an impression.

Adûnakali listed a little as she and Lujayn made their way over to the edge of the roof with its (thankfully) high, sturdy rail; there weren’t a lot of people up here today, and for that she was grateful, not wanting an audience to her unsteadiness. She wasn’t afraid of heights, not really. But there was something disorienting to being so far from the ground. It was like the whole world has lost its center.

She shook off this feeling and shot a quizzical look down at Lujayn. “Alright, what am I looking for?”

Lujayn pointed out towards the harbor. “I think it’s still—yes, it’s still beached. Just look out to the Shipbreaker?”

“The Shipbreaker? Oh, Lujayn.”

Umbar’s harbor was wide, its waters much calmer than the roiling gray soup of the ocean beyond. However wide the harbor was, arriving ships who made it past the gauntlet of Gondor’s warships had yet another hazard to deal with before docking that made paths into the harbor limited.

There was a wide shoal of stone and shell midden that stretched across much of the mouth of the harbor. At low tide, it jutted from the water like the spine of a lizard, but at high, it was barely visible, and easily missed at night or in poor weather conditions such as storm or fog. Long before Adûnakali’s time had it been named the Shipbreaker, and for good reason; Adûnakali had lost count of the number of ships she had seen beached on the shoal, hulls gouged open and the wood floating in the water while rescue ships evacuated the crew.

“Oh, another beached ship? Really, Lujayn, why would you—“

Adûnakali looked to the Shipbreaker. All she could do was fall silent.

The city’s climate was such that snow and ice were things that rarely made an appearance, even in the bitterest months of winter. Adûnakali had lived here for more than thirty years, and had seen snow in maybe seven of them. And that snow was not the thick, lingering snow of the mountains; it was snow that melted overnight and flooded all the streets with slush. Snow and ice just weren’t things that often entered into life here.

She was utterly unprepared for the sight out in the harbor.

There it was, a ship beached on the shoal. Despite the pallid sky and pewter sea, it managed to stand out, glittering silver in the gloomy light of day. There it was, a ship beached on the shoal, hull, deck, mast, and ragged sails all coated with ice.

“What on earth?” Adûnakali barely recognized her own voice as she asked the question. “Was there an ice storm out at sea?”

“I don’t know. It showed up a few hours ago—look, they’re still sending rescue ships out.” Lujayn’s face contorted, eyes overly bright. “I met someone from the docks on my way to find you; he said all the crew were dead when the first rescue ship made it to the shoal.”

“A warship must have found them before they made their way here. That, or they all froze to death.” The ice glinted like the blade of a sword made of elf-steel. “Do you know what the cargo was?”

“I’m not certain.” Lujayn scratched the rail with her fingernails. “I heard someone say it was books.”

-0-0-0-

It wouldn’t be long before Adûnakali found out precisely what had been on the ship locked in ice. The day after she and Lujayn had looked down on that ship from the roof of the public library, Adûnakali found herself called into the office of the head of the linguistics department, a man named Zagarôn. Though Adûnakali’s specialty was Quenya, she had been shunted into the history department long ago; most of the linguistics department seemed most of the times to have forgotten she existed. So a call from the head of the linguistics department was quite unusual.

Being in the linguistics department was… difficult. Every time Adûnakali traversed these halls, she was filled with a sense of bitter misplacement. By rights, she should have been housed here, but petty politics had conspired to…

No. Whatever was going on, Adûnakali needed to walk into it with a clear mind, at least. Anything less would serve her ill.

When Adûnakali reached Zagarôn’s office, she found the door standing open, and taking that as an invitation, walked inside. She found Zagarôn sitting at his desk. There was a stack of old, leather-bound books some six or seven tall, sitting off to the left-hand side of the center of the desk. Two chairs were set up on the other side of the desk from Zagarôn’s, and in one of those chairs sat Lujayn.

Adûnakali raised an eyebrow at Lujayn as she took her seat, but Lujayn just shrugged.

“Ah, good; you’ve arrived,” Zagarôn said, though his clipped tones suggested otherwise.

For her part, Adûnakali nodded coolly. “I must say, I was surprised. When I was banished to the hinterlands, I had not looked for any sort of reprieve.

“That… was not my decision to make,” Zagarôn told her on a sigh, “and that isn’t why I called you here, anyways.” He patted the stack of books. “I called you _both_ here to speak of these.”

“I’m surprised you’re still here,” Lujayn offered, a smile that, if it didn’t succeed in being winning, at least succeeded in being non-threatening, curving her mouth into a crescent. “I would have thought you’d want to go home to your family when the students weren’t here.”

He sighed, lines furrowing deep into his brow. “I do. With this, my business here will be concluded, and neither of you will be seeing much of me until the spring semester begins. I presume both of you have heard that a ship beached on the Shipbreaker yesterday?”

“Yes,” Adûnakali murmured. The sight of the ship was still burned deep into her mind, though the impression felt cold. “We saw it ourselves.”

The look on Zagarôn’s face was almost sympathetic. “It did make for a strange sight, did it not? Well, whatever the reason behind the ship’s condition and the deaths of its crew, it was carrying cargo meant for the university. Not its _only_ cargo, mind, but the chest our cargo was in was the only one not to sustain any damage from the ice.

“Lujayn—“ he smiled when he looked at her “—what I ordered was meant for you. I received word from one of my contacts that there was a man of some means living in the Yellow Mountains who had books written in Cirth he wished to sell. My contact was unable to determine whether the books were written in _Sindarin_ , but I didn’t wish to miss the opportunity.”

Zagarôn took all but one of the books from the stack, and handed them to Lujayn. Her eyes lit up as she accepted them, filling with an almost manic joy Adûnakali had never seen in them before. “If it isn’t Sindarin, it’s likely Khuzdul; I think that would make these the first books written in Khuzdul to ever make their way to this department.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll make good use of them, no matter the language.” Zagarôn directed his attention to Adûnakali. “There was something else in the chest that we didn’t expect.” He rested his hand on the sole book that hadn’t gone to Lujayn, a tome about an inch thick, bound with cracked leather colored a brindled brown. “We found a book written in what appears to be Quenya. I thought it best to give the book to you; you are, after all, the person most likely to be able to glean observations of importance from it.”

That was not, Adûnakali knew, normal procedure in circumstances such as this. Normal procedure would have entailed investigations, discussions, likely would have involved holding the book for a time before the gears of bureaucracy turned and a decision was finally made as to what was to be done with it. It was a sign of just how unimportant her area of study was considered that normal procedure was being bypassed—at least, that was what she suspected.

Adûnakali found she didn’t care about that as much as she normally would have. It was so rare that she ever received new materials that she just didn’t care.

Adûnakali felt as if her blood had been replaced with wine as she reached for the book. The binding was dry and cracked under her hands; the book itself was cooler than the air around it. It was all she could do not to quiver as she redirected her attention to Zagarôn. “Unexpected or no, I look forward to seeing what it has to offer.”

-0-0-0-

However much she might have been looking forward to it, Adûnakali didn’t have time for perusing her new book for the next couple of days. The rest of the day after she received the book was absorbed in cleaning her quarters on the university grounds (the maid was on leave), cooking her (boring) supper, and doing more paperwork. The next day was occupied by a function held for faculty who remained on campus between semesters—honestly, Adûnakali went there primarily because they had food—and trying to figure out where the _draught_ was coming from. Her little house felt so cold, no matter how she kept the fire going, no matter how she kept the braziers hot in the rooms without a hearth. She couldn’t make out any new holes in the roof, or any cracks in the walls, or gaps between the windowpanes and the sill, and yet the house she called her own was colder than she could recall it being at this time of year.

She didn’t have a chance to speak to Lujayn again, but given the happy look on her face, Adûnakali would guess that the books she had received were proving to contain much of probative value. She could only hope her own book would prove just as valuable.

Finally, with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, another draped over her legs, and a cushion to serve as a buffer between her body and the chilly floor, Adûnakali sat down at the low table in her sitting room. The book sat before her, a few sheets of parchment set out to the right for preliminary notes. She had set out a cup of steaming tea (there was at least one thing to consume that she could make correctly) to the left, and wisps of steam rose from the cup, snaking up towards the ceiling. She thought it might actually be warmer outside, but there weren’t many places outside she felt comfortable taking such an old book (The Elves and the Adûnaim of old had had techniques for preserving books long beyond any natural ‘lifespan,’ but even so, this book was clearly getting on in years). Even if no one else cared what became of it, Adûnakali would try, to the best of her ability, not to add damage to the ravages of years.

“Let’s see what you have to show me,” she muttered.

Despite the chill in Adûnakali’s house (she cast a suspicious eye to the brass brazier, only to make out a gentle glow around it), the book still managed, just as it had been in Zagarôn’s office, to be colder to the touch than the air around it. Though Adûnakali knew the leather to be calf, when she ran her fingers over it, she had the impression of touching the skin of a very old man or woman. No longer supple, but carrying the memory of suppleness within the grain. It gave the impression of being often-read, though there were no creases in the spine that Adûnakali could make out. She would likely get much use out of it, as well; the spine was slightly thicker than two of Adûnakali’s fingers put together, and if all of the pages had been written on, it could be a while before she made it all the way through.

The pages were uneven in length and width, thin, delicate parchment with ragged edges and small, dark spots on the first few whose source Adûnakali couldn’t pinpoint; they didn’t _look_ like mold, didn’t have the texture or the smell of it, either. Speaking of smells, when Adûnakali first opened the book, she was hit with a wave of salt, though the odor had been completely absent as long as it was shut. She paused, frowning, as the smell of salt settled thickly on her tongue, prickled in her nostrils, made her eyes burn. It wasn’t ocean brine, not exactly. It was… She wasn’t certain what it was. So long as the book wasn’t water-damaged, and it didn’t seem to be, it didn’t really matter.

When Adûnakali turned to the first page with text, she found, to her relief, that Zagarôn had been correct regarding the language of the book. It was Quenya, and written in Tengwar as opposed to Sarati. She didn’t at first glance spot anything that might add to the university’s knowledge of the linguistic evolution of Quenya over the past few thousand years. Quenya as a language had largely stagnated in the wake of the fall of Eregion; this was always a problem with Elven languages (it didn’t help that the Adûnaim’s Elf-loving cousins to the north were eager adopters of this unnatural stagnation), but at least with the Ñoldor, there had been some desire for change and evolution. And even with a staunch aversion to change and an eternity on this earth to fight tooth and nail against it, linguistic evolution and divergence were things that were bound to happen. It was inevitable.

Most of Adûnakali’s research finds dated to the Second Age, and many of them had come from Eregion, though she had found things from other times and other places. The forms from Eregion and Gondolin had been especially interesting, for they had both borne heavy influences from Sindarin (Iathrim for the former, and Mithrim for the latter), and they had actually shown something regarding acceptance to change. Not eagerness, perhaps, but acceptance.

Of course, Adûnakali had had precious little experience of Quenya texts written while the Ñoldor were still living in their deathless lands across the Sea. Those texts written in what she had heard others refer to as “pure” Tirion Quenya (though it was worth pointing out that the historical records, namely Fëanor’s frankly disproportionate reaction to the change in spelling of his mother’s epithet, pointed towards some evolution in the Tirion form or forms) were guarded jealously by their Elven keepers, and a university in a land historically unfriendly to the Elves was unlikely, highly unlikely, to get their hands on an original, or even a copy. The few they did have, Adûnakali had no idea if they were originals or not, and they were kept under close guard in a backroom of the university library. She could count on one hand the number of times she had been allowed to study them directly, and had for the most part been obliged to make do with her predecessors’ notes and conclusions. Even with the current political climate, some care was taken.

This was… Adûnakali had expected a volume from the libraries of Ost-in-Edhil. The Elves of the North had recovered most of the books that had remained in the city following its sack, but many had been carried off during the sack, and still more had gone missing following the sack, before the Elves had deemed it safe to recover what they could from the destroyed city. She was familiar with the Ost-in-Edhil forms; she could recognize it at a glance. This was not any form of Eregion Quenya, let alone that of its doomed capital.

This was one of the Tirion forms.

Adûnakali had never thought she would be grateful for the way the university treated the study of Quenya as its own dirty secret. She was grateful now, though, for she knew that if Zagarôn had given this book more than the most cursory of inspections, it would have been put under lock and key, and it would have been months before Adûnakali was allowed to do so much as look at it from across a room, if she was ever allowed to do so much at all. That feeling of her blood being replaced with wine? Had returned. She felt light-headed as she brushed her fingers over the page. Even if the book yielded no fresh insights into the evolution of Quenya over the past few millennia, it was still an enormously valuable find. And since the powers that be were determined to devalue the study of Quenya as much as they could, Adûnakali would be the first here to read it.

Well, there wasn’t any point in wasting more time, was there?

The handwriting was uneven, a touch slurred in places; not drunk-slurred, but the kind of slurring that came when the hand was unsteady and yet the writer must write on. After a few moments’ consideration, though, Adûnakali no longer had any difficulty making out the words. She drew a draught of tea, and read:

_‘To any who read this, if this journal is ever found, you must forgive the poor quality of my partnership. You must forgive also any scorch marks that might be found on these pages.’_

Panic surged through Adûnakali at the mention of ‘scorch marks.’ She flipped through the book, searching frantically for any sign of scorch marks or other fire damage. It was only upon finding none that she returned to her place in the book.

_‘I must write this account close to my fire. The ink may freeze if not; the cold of these frozen wastes is utterly unlike anything I have ever experienced in my lost home. The cold is a living thing, as ravenous as any bear we have encountered, as vicious as the other, nameless beasts who have dogged our steps and preyed on the weak among us since our departure from Araman._

_‘I must also write this account close to the fire for want of light. Were the Trees still living, their light would not reach here, and the stars, though beautiful, do not provide the light my weak eyes require for writing. The Fëanárians took all of the lamps with them when they sailed away in their ill-gotten ships, damn them. So I must write close to my fire. Nothing else will do._

_‘If this account is ever found, I cannot ask the reader to withhold their judgment against my deeds. The Valar have damned me; I cannot ask a prospective reader to do anything less. Captivity in Aman was unbearable to us, but what we did to escape our captivity was monstrous. I will not ask your forgiveness for my deeds. I can only ask your forgiveness if you find my handwriting to be especially poor. Heat and light are difficult to come by, and my hands have not ceased shaking since we entered Araman._

_‘We have all long since given up on any effort to keep time. The cold made short work of our clocks, and without the light of the Trees, time has lost its meaning. It may have been weeks since we left. It may have been months. Or years. Or centuries. It may be that our punishment is to languish here forever, to never reach Endóre, and instead wander the Ice, directionless, until our bodies succumb to cold or to hunger, or our spirits quit our abused bodies in their torment. I would not be surprised. The Valar have proven themselves capable of much I would not have expected._

_‘As it stands, I doubt that very many of us will be able to languish here forever. Many have died already, and as our food stores run lower and lower, as kindling for fires becomes more difficult to come by, many more will die in the future, if we cannot find a path to Endóre. Navigation is all but impossible in these environs; our compasses spin and spin and never settle on north. And we who have never had any need to navigate by the stars have little idea how to do so now, especially considering the new stars Elentári has seen to toss into the expanse. With the blessing of Finwë Ñolofinwë, a group is being formed to take a different route, in the hopes that perhaps we can find the path to Endóre quickly enough to save those of the host who still live. I intend to join them. I am no warrior or hunter, but I know how to set up a tent, and the team will need someone to chronicle their experiences.’_

The rest of the page was blank. Adûnakali looked back to the beginning of the entry, and sure enough, there was no date written out by the start of the entry, just a ‘1.’ Well, that was one way to keep track of what was happening when, if time itself has failed you.

Rarely had Adûnakali wished that she had the focus on history that the university liked to pretend she did. She knew enough of history to know just how rare a find this was: of the accounts of the Ñoldor’s journey across the Helcaraxë, very few that were written while that journey was being undertaken had survived, and those that had would only be pried from their Elven keepers’ cold, dead hands. It any in the history department cared to reveal their own preferences and expose themselves to greater scrutiny, there must have been at least a few who’d go mad for a book such as this.

They could have the book when Adûnakali was done with it. She had too much to potentially gain from the reading to give it up just now.

When Adûnakali shut the book, the smell of salt left the room all at once, and she noticed two things. The first was that there was very little light left in the room. The windows were bathed a dark, rusty crimson, and her candle was burned nearly all the way down. The second was that the brazier was dark and cool, and that the wet, piercing cold had settled more firmly over the room than it had been earlier that day.

Adûnakali could barely keep her hands from shaking as she ignited her brazier back into life. It wouldn’t be until hours later that she realized that she hadn’t taken any notes.

-0-0-0-

Remembering her dreams was uncommon for Adûnakali. Many of the Adûnaim of “pure” (inbred) blood had gifts beyond the ken of ordinary men, and the gift of prophecy was one of them. Adûnakali had heard many tales of prophetic or otherwise significant dreams in the history of her own family, back when they had fled Anadûnê when Sauron had turned to human sacrifice and many of Ar-Pharazôn’s supporters had been forced to reevaluate many, if not most, of the choices that had brought them to where they were. Adûnakali herself had never had any facility in this regard. She didn’t have any prophetic dreams, any significant dreams, and as she had mentioned, she hardly ever even remembered her dreams. At best, she had a few vague impressions to unsettle her for an hour or two, until even that fled her memory.

And she hadn’t properly remembered the dream she had last night. But she had woken with her heart racing and her limbs tense, and however cold her bedroom was, Adûnakali had the impression of waking from somewhere far colder. There was a spider web of frost glittering on her window. She half-expected to see a little ice spider scuttle across it, but outside, the night was still.

Adûnakali, wrapped in a woolen cloak rather than a woolen shawl, found Lujayn out in the gardens later that day. “How goes?” she called to her.

Lujayn looked up from her seat by one of the cedar trees. Even before she opened her mouth, Adûnakali could guess at her response. Her face positively glowed, her brown eyes glimmering with the satisfaction of one whose mind was finally being properly stimulated for the first time in a while. “Well,” she chirped. “Very well. None of the books are from Doriath, at least not so far as I can tell. I didn’t really expect them to be, honestly; Doriath was never a bastion of written literature—stronger oral tradition, I think—and most of the books were left behind after Menegroth’s second sack, so it all went down when Beleriand was flooded. As best as I can tell, it’s actually all Second Age work, which is actually pretty rare? Even the survivors from Doriath had mostly switched over to Tengwar by about, I think… Yes, it was about halfway through the Second Age that they had made the switch. Tengwar was the favored alphabet for all the Elves except for the Wood-Elves and the Avari by then, so finding something like this was about as likely as picking hen’s teeth up off the ground. And it’s _definitely_ Sindarin; not a word of Khuzdul in there.”

“What are they about? Or are the topics different for each book?”

“Ehh…” Lujayn waved a hand. “It’s not really anything special. Well, to be more precise, none of them make for riveting reading. One of the books is a ledger for a pottery business. Another appears to be a log of weather patterns for the area the writer was living in at the time—Lindon, I think. The rest are just odds and ends. But it really is _so_ rare to find an Elf still writing in Cirth past the first couple of centuries of the Second Age, and I’m hoping I can tease out some information from it. Maybe there was an enclave of some kind? I don’t know. How have things been going for you? Was that book actually written in Quenya, or did Zagarôn just not bother to confirm it?”

“Oh, no.” Adûnakali drew her cloak closer about her shoulders. “It is certainly written in Quenya.”

The smile that suddenly unfurled over Lujayn’s face was a little startling; Adûnakali hadn’t really expected her to care. “Oh, that’s good! Has it been interesting?”

There was hardly anyone on the university grounds at present, at least not compared to when class was in session. Lujayn wasn’t much of a gossip. But she _did_ talk, and Adûnakali didn’t want to risk having the book taken away from her. So Adûnakali shrugged, grimacing when this gesture forced her to wrap her suddenly loosened cloak back firmly around her shoulders. “It’s nothing too interesting,” she said dismissively, hoping that Lujayn didn’t pick up on anything false in her voice. “Just somebody’s diary.”

Judging by the tilt of Lujayn’s head and the slight, frozen quality of her smile, she hadn’t picked up on anything being off. “Well, at least it’s something new.”

“Indeed.” Adûnakali rubbed her hands together. “Now if I could just hold a pen steady long enough to take proper notes; stars, it’s been so _cold_.”

“Are you…” A frown stole over Lujayn’s face as her eyes raked up and down Adûnakali’s body. “Are you not feeling well?”

“I’m feeling perfectly well. Why do you ask?”

“Well, it’s not been so cold that having trouble writing would be a problem. “Lujayn picked at her sleeve cuff. “At least, I don’t think so. Are you certain you aren’t running a fever?”

“Ha, no fever.” Her cloak wasn’t nearly warm enough. “I hardly ever feel the hand of illness upon me. I’m just cold.” Adûnakali shot an ambivalent stare up at the gray sky choked with clouds. “I always have hated winter.”

-0-0-0-

It was a good thing that firewood was so cheap in this city, for Adûnakali found herself using quite a lot of it. The fires she lit at her heart never seemed to warm her enough to ward off the pervasive chill, and thus she added logs to the fire every time it started to go down, as often as was safe. Her braziers were kept hot as well, and Adûnakali found herself keeping her cloak and her shawl wrapped about her body at all times, as well as a number of blankets from her bed every time she sat down somewhere. She only took her shoes off at bed, and wore stockings to bed in an effort to keep her feet warm. What a miserable winter this was—and it wasn’t even snowing, either.

She at least had plenty of soup and tea; a visit to the old soup shop near the second district’s postal office and begging for extra cans of tea leaves from the teahouse near the campus had ensured that. It did not warm her for long, but while it did, it was appreciated, and the savory aroma of soup had always been one Adûnakali found soothing. The only thing that could make it better would be if she could have lime in her soup and lemon in her tea, but one was unlikely to find either such fruits in the city at this time of year.

Perhaps she’d go out and try to find a stall selling kunāfa. That sounded nice. The only trouble would be trying to find a way to keep it from going cold while she took it home.

It was not the kind of weather that really bore idly leaving the house, and thus, Adûnakali had plenty of time to read the book that had come to town by way of frozen shipwreck. The salt smell completely overpowered the aroma of soup, and Adûnakali couldn’t hold her pen steadily long enough to write legible notes, but so long as no one asked about it, she thought she could just hold onto the book until warmer days came again and write her notes then. It would be better to read through the book at least once without taking notes that she could better determine what she wanted her notes to _be_ , and she really didn’t think anyone was going to come looking for it, not if she didn’t draw attention to the book itself.

And she wanted to read this book. She just… She didn’t know what it was. She wanted to read it all the way through, uninterrupted. She wouldn’t be satisfied until she had finished.

From the entry marked ‘2’:

_‘I was successful in my petition, and was granted leave to join the expedition. Truth be told, I did not have to petition very hard. There were very few volunteers, and when we left, our party was of twelve people. It is an auspicious number, twelve. I hope that bodes well for our journey in the future. Surely I am allowed such a small amount of hope, at least._

_‘We can still make out the lights of the fires of the main host, far to the… I will assume it to be the southwest. I refuse to think that we aren’t at least walking east. Even if we don’t know which way is north, I must believe that we are at least walking in vaguely the right direction. The little fires glimmer like stars brought down to earth, with streams of flickering blood pouring out from the sounds they gouged in the barren earth of this forsaken land._

_‘Spires of ice rise up before us, sparkling like shining white teeth arching out of an immense mouth. At times, I fancy that I can see rivulets of saliva trailing down the tips of these teeth to the base. What would happen if such an immeasurably vast mouth decided to snap shut? Would it eat us, and grant us the oblivion the Ice is determined to eke from our bodies, inch by inch? Or would it aim higher, and lift up its head to devour the sky instead, and plunge the little bodies that scurry on the ground into a darkness that will never be alleviated by the light of any stars? I would never have countenanced such a thing when I still lived in Aman. I would never have imagined that a darkness denser than the gloom of Alqualondë could touch Aman._

_‘We plan to rest a while, and then continue on. It’s expected that we will pass out of sight of the main host before we stop to rest again. I must confess that I do not look forward to that moment, when it comes. An auspicious number twelve might be, but when the host passes out of sight, we will truly be twelve, against this vast, pitiless wilderness. I wonder how we will fare.’_

And thus ended the second entry. Adûnakali wondered exactly who the writer of this account had been before they had embarked on the Exiles’ journey to Beleriand, for they had a certain way with words that suggested, perhaps, a literary career of some kind. Or maybe they had just been an aspiring poet. If Adûnakali ever found a name attached to these entries, perhaps something would slot into place. But then, if the writer intended to name themselves, wouldn’t they have done it already?

Oh, forget that. Adûnakali was more certain than ever that there was a draught somewhere in her house, for the cold had taken on a current and something that was the ghost of a voice, and she had taken to wearing a scarf around her head the way a Haradrim woman would. It eased the throbbing in her ears, at least. It eased the throbbing enough for her to go on reading.

From the entry marked ‘3’:

_‘We passed out of sight of the main host some time ago. We have stopped to rest three times since it became just us and the Ice, just us and the barren earth, just us and the darkness that starlight cannot pierce more fully than a needle pierces a length of heavy cloth. If plants grow on these barren lands, we have never found them; there is not even lichen to cover the boulders. But we have managed to trap and kill a few animals, and if we are not fully sustained, we are at least a little further from the gates of starvation. If we find a waterfront, it may be possible to fish for our supper instead of trapping it or chasing after it on land._

_‘There are what appears to be mountains, far off to the distance. Of course, they’re so far away that it’s impossible to tell if they are actually mountains, or more of the hungry claws—or teeth, or spires; all descriptors fit—of ice that grow thicker and thicker with each mile, so that it grows more and more difficult for anyone to walk in a straight path. The head of our expedition does not care for distinctions; she commands that we walk in the direction of those ‘mountains.’ As she has pointed out, they are, even from a distance, visibly taller than the ice claws, and thus they may indeed be mountains. If they are, that may signal an end to our journey. We hope._

_‘Twelve we are, and yet at times I fancy we are thirteen. I catch myself counting the number of our group, each of us in turn, and though I have never seen more than twelve of us, including myself, but I can’t seem to stop counting at twelve. It’s likely nothing. There has been more than one incident of our present environs preying in the minds of those who trek across it; the cold and the ice have both done little to help the state of mind of the host. And it is so cold that it is difficult to sleep, for one cannot sleep for more than a few hours before one must wake, lest the cold settle in our bones and do worse than simply chill us. Besides, we are not missing any of the meager amounts of food we have stored.’_

Whoever the writer was, Adûnakali thought she might feel a little sorry for them. So completely losing track of how much food you have on hand that you think someone else has been in your house-slash-living space, eating it, was certainly a feeling she could relate to.

Though she had little desire to leave the house when she was still so cold and none of her clothes were equal to the task of keeping the cold out, Adûnakali elected to go out for supper, rather than try to make something of her own. She didn’t want to putter about in her kitchen for more than an hour, only to produce something so bland that she would have blushed to serve it to a guest.

It was relatively late in the evening when she left, close to the eighth hour after noon, but when she walked the streets, none of the lamps had been lit, leaving her path shrouded in gloom. There were fewer people than she would have expected, especially considering her path carried her through a part of the city that grew significantly more lively _after_ sunset; the shops and other places of business were quieter than she would have expected, their windows dim. The whole city was dim. The moon was full, but it seemed to shine as if behind a veil. The stars were barely visible. The wind carried the promise of snow on its icy breath, though no snow fell.

-0-0-0-

_‘I wonder if perhaps I wasn’t wrong when I thought that only twelve of us had volunteered to go on this expedition. Perhaps it was thirteen all along, and I simply miscounted, my mind already rendered slow by cold.’_

Adûnakali’s window shutters were caked with dust when she drew them shut over the windows. She hated having to do it. Her house was so dim when she shut out the sunlight; it felt like walking into a crypt. But she saw no other avenue by which to block the draught, however it might be entering the house, than by shutting up the windows as much as possible. And even if the draught did turn out to be coming from somewhere else, doing this at least allowed her to take some sort of action. It let her do something useful. Didn’t it?

The cold was worse now. Adûnakali had had to lay out a pallet by the hearth; it had become so frigid in her bedroom that she feared the consequences of falling asleep, even under many layers of quilts and blankets. Of course, sleeping under these selfsame  layers in front of an active fire presented some hazards of its own, but Adûnakali feared a stray spark far less than she feared the hungry cold that encroached on all sides. She was a little surprised no one had been by her house; the university had a protocol for extreme weather. Maybe they had simply forgotten she was here.

Her hands and ears did throb, and her head ached from the cold. It was painful to hold the book, which felt now like a block of ice that had never felt the obliterating touch of the sun. It was painful to focus upon the words that swam before her eyes. She read on. There was nothing else to do in this freezing house, and a pain came over her when she did not read that was worse than any throbbing ears or hands or head.

_‘I am certain now that our party numbers more than twelve. No matter how many times that I could the number of our expedition, I can never stop at twelve; my mind races past that number in such a rush to settle on ‘thirteen,’ that I cannot stop it from doing so. No one else in the party has openly expressed similar concerns, but all are on edge, in ways I think have little to do with the cold or the scarcity of our food. I have caught some looking over us all in turn, in much the same way I imagine I must look, when attempting to take a headcount._

_‘Three of our hunters attempted to trap and kill a large mammalian creature they encountered amidst the boulders and those hungry, wicked spires of ice. They had a difficult time describing just what it was that they found. The size puts me in mind of a bear, but the proportions are more in line with a wolf of monstrous size, larger even than the beast the Fëanárian prince Tyelkormo calls his own. But no wolf has ever worn the antlers of an elk, and no elk has ever been possessed of the teeth to so easily rend flesh._

_‘The hunter it attacked has been seen to by the physician who joined our party. He thinks she will live, thought it will be a while before she can put her full weight upon her right leg. Perhaps it is a mercy that our narrow, winding, uneven path slows our progress to a crawl as it does. If we had the open terrain required for a brisk march, there is every chance that she would be left behind, as we were forced to leave behind others in the past._

_‘I have never heard tell of such a beast as what the hunters encountered out in the wastes. When we were but children, the Valar told us that within Aman lives every sort of beast that has ever walked the earth. I see this is another lie the Valar told us, to stop us asking questions, to stop us looking upon them as anything but perfect. I wish I could say I was surprised, but I am not. It’s so petty. It’s absolutely what I would expect.’_

Adûnakali found herself nodding grimly along. She was, after all, of the blood of the Adûnaim. Her people had had ample experience with the lies the Valar told.

As she nodded, the book burned one of her fingers, and when she drew her hand back, that finger was tinted a stinging, searing red.

-0-0-0- 

_‘We are being followed._ ’

The window shutters, once caked with grimy dust, now glittered with frost untouched by any hint of grime in spite of the fire constantly roaring in the hearth. Adûnakali had not ventured out for food in a few days; if this was how cold it was in her house, she would have to be a fool to go out and brave what was undoubtedly the coldest winter this city had experienced in living memory. She still had plenty of preserved food—pickled, dry, and salted—on hand, so she was in no danger of starving for the time being. However, the tastes offered by these pickled, dried, and salted foods were nothing on the taste of fresh, and she did hope the weather would turn soon.

But she didn’t think it would. Call it a premonition, one of the only ones Adûnakali had ever had. This cold was settled too firmly to be a passing fancy of the weather. It clung, willfully, and would not pass unless forced away. She felt that in her bones.

_‘We are being followed.’_

Adûnakali’s dreams had taken on such a tone of late, and thus, to see ‘ _We are being followed_ ’ in a shaky, trailing scrawl was hardly a welcome vision. When she read it, her stomach turned, and she put the book away from her, rubbing her forehead with a gloved hand. Her burned finger throbbed and ached as if pounded on by the head of a hammer.

The cold bit her through her gloves as she took the book back up, garnering a yelp. If Adûnakali didn’t know better, she would have sworn had had felt actual teeth closing around her fingertips.

_‘We are being followed. I was at the back of the line during our last march, and when by chance I looked back over my shoulder, I saw it._

_‘It appeared to me as a shadow upon a megalithic rock, darker than the faintly-starlit gloom around it. At the first, I thought my eyes deceived me, and I looked away, and back towards my companions. Mirage and illusion are no strangers to we Exiles in this forsaken land, and I thought it merely one of them. I had more important things to occupy my attention than flights of fancy._

_‘But some time later, I looked behind me again, and this time, there could be no mistaking what I saw._

_‘It is not merely that this shadow that was no shadow was darker than the gloom around it. It ate what little light was cast down into its path, so that light died before it, and darkness was thrown out in its wake. I watched the starlight puddled at its feet curdle and darken until nothing was left but an empty memory of its radiance. I cannot say or guess at the shape of the shadow, only that its shape was undulating and amorphous and seemed to suggest the shape of one of the Eruhíni only vaguely._

_‘Not an illusion. It is not an illusion; of that much, I am certain. It’s too consistent, and I have seen it too many times for it to be illusion or delusion or any such thing. I am as of yet uncertain as to whether any of the rest of the expedition have seen the one who follows behind us. One came to the back of the line to see what was the matter; they did not respond to the shadow’s presence, but then, neither did them seem even to notice, focused as they were upon me._

_‘We are being followed. Of that much, I am certain. By what, I do not know. We are the ones accursed by the Lord of the Dead and all his brethren. We are they who shed the blood of the Falmari at the quays of Alqualondë. We are the unhappy people who have lost so many upon this hungry Ice. It could be any number of things that stalks our path._

_‘I wish it would leave us be.’_

Adûnakali came away from this section feeling oddly ill. Her mind was pounding, and her empty stomach felt weak and roiling. The room spun a little as she swallowed hard, trying to regain her bearings. She needed…

She was uncertain as to just what she needed. Eventually, Adûnakali settled on needing to open one of the sets of window shutters. It had been—Adûnakali couldn’t remember the last time she had looked outside. She had likely broken some sort of record. Adûnakali sighed gustily, and, as she stepped forward on slightly unsteady feet, she pulled the two blankets wrapped around her shoulders a little closer, for all the good that did her, which was none. Given just how miserably cold it had been, she could only imagine what it looked like outside; honestly, she was surprised she hadn’t woken up in the morning with icicles on her nose.

(It occurred too late to Adûnakali that she couldn’t remember the last time she had seen light shining under the slats of the shutters.)

Adûnakali’s hands fumbled at the latch as she struggled to get the shutters open. She hoped, really hoped, that the cold hadn’t done some damage to this metal latch. She’d hate to have to have the latches replaced; her salary would be hurting from that.

At last, she wrenched the latch up, and pushed the shutters open and away from the window.

When she saw what laid beyond her house, she couldn’t restrain the horrified scream that shot up from her chest.

The view from Adûnakali’s windows was not terribly riveting sight. Housing for faculty on the university grounds were made up of small houses constructed in uninspired architectural styles. There wasn’t enough space between them to plant flowers or vegetable gardens. There was no grass or brushes planted between the houses; there were just stone pathways and dusty dirt tracks. It came as a surprise to approximately no one that so many of the faculty who lived here while class was in session preferred to go elsewhere whenever it was not.

When Adûnakali looked out of her window, she should have seen the house neighboring her own. It was a familiar sight to her; a rough, gray stone wall with dust stains in the uneven hills and valleys of the stone. She did not see that. And so, she screamed.

It was night, but no moonlight fell over the earth. There were stars, but their light was far-off and weak, as if a semi-transparent veil had been pinned over the black sky. Adûnakali saw no houses. She saw no university walls, either interior or exterior, off in the distance. What she saw instead were megalithic boulders untouched by any lichen, and massive claws of ice that stretched towards the sky, half in threat and half in supplication. Beads of snow—or was it ice?—hung suspended in the sky like flecks of mica floating in a snow globe. There was no sound but the forlorn, empty howling of the wind.

Adûnakali screamed, and screamed again. There was a fresh scream on her lips as she ran for the door, stinging and biting as she struggled to throw open the door that seemed frozen shut to its frame. In the last moment before she finally got the door open, she clung to the wild hope that perhaps what she had seen out of the window had been naught but an illusion. That her mind was playing tricks, and that when she opened the door, her world would be set to rights.

The door was wrenched open with an agonizing screech of unwilling hinges, and the sight beyond provided no relief.

Her scream was lost in the howling torrent of the wind that would allow nothing to overpower it. On impulse, her legs moving before her mind could break away from the need to scream, she sprinted out into her nightmarishly-changed environment. The moment she did this, her mind was taken instead by regret: the wind battered her body, burning her cheeks and making the many layers of wool between her skin and the elements seem as the sheerest, flimsiest chiffon.

A mistake, obviously, and Adûnakali sought quickly to rectify it. But when Adûnakali turned on her heel to retreat inside, her house was much, much further away than it had been when she had halted. She was instead surrounded by those boulders and those claws of ice, and there was only the faintest glow of golden light to signal where her house was at all.

It was not a simple thing to run back to the house, back to a place that however cold it felt within, was so, _so_ much warmer than this altered landscape. The boulders crowded in around her, rendering her path narrow and weaving. They stretched out towards her, beating against her legs and her sides and her shoulders, leaving her so burning and sore that Adûnakali was certain she bled, though she could not see her abraded skin. The wind shot through the narrow gaps in the boulders, attempting roughly to push her backwards, further away from safety.

By the time Adûnakali reached her home, her legs and feet were so numb that she could scarcely stay upright and her hands would barely work, fingers almost too stiff to bend, as she forced the door shut. All at once, there was silence, the howling of the wind extinguished. But the shutters on the window she had looked through earlier were still open, and the window showed the same impossible sight as it had before, and there was a puddle of melting snow on the floor.

Every last bit of energy that had fired Adûnakali’s body fled it all at once, the sudden snuffing of a candle. She knew, deep in her bones, that sleep would not solve this, but still, she could do nothing but lower herself onto the pallet by the fire, trembling in ways that had something to do with the cold, and in other ways that had nothing to do with the cold at all. Her dreams were full of ice.

-0-0-0-

There would be a later, desperate attempt to find a way out of her new reality through finishing the book. How that attempt went, no one now can say, but the last few entries in the book written by its original author are not in question.

_‘Three of the members of our party are now missing. One was our advance scout; he went off to try to scout out a path for us to take when next we take up the march, and never returned. The other two are hunters; I would not be surprised if they met their end at the jaws of the beast they hunted, but then, there are other fates to be found on the Ice, rather than simply being food for what beasts lurk in the dark._

_‘We who once were twelve, now are nine. The leader of our party has instructed us to wait longer, to see if they will find us again, but I know they will not. They are lost, and I do not expect we will see them again._

_‘I have seen the shadow that is no shadow again. It lurks just beyond the perimeter of our campsite, shifting out of the path of the firelight. What does it want from us? I wish it would leave us be.’_

_…_

_‘We are nearly out of food. There is no game to be found on this stretch of land, and another of our hunters has vanished while looking for it, bringing our number down to eight. I’ve counted. We have enough food for what in a land of blessed light would have lasted around four days, and after that, we must find more on our own. If we can._

_‘The shadow saw down at the fire with us. We could all see it, but no one spoke, no one acknowledged it. Darkness flooded out from it, until all was blind. It was cold in that darkness. It was not the cold of this barren land. It was unlike anything I have ever felt.’_

_…_

_‘The eyes the eyes they burn like fire they must be the eyes of the Ainur they have come for us they have come’_

-0-0-0-

A curious thing occurred this past winter. One morning on the grounds of the Royal University of Umbar, staff who were wintering on campus awoke to find one of their neighboring houses completely covered with ice. The resident of the house, a professor of Quenya named Adûnakali, could not be found, and searches for her are ongoing.

The house was in a state of disarray, as though the professor had not left it for weeks. For reasons that are at best ill-understood, it appears she elected to sleep on a pallet by the hearth in her sitting room, as opposed to her bed. Every blanket, bedsheet, cloak, and shawl in the house had been gathered onto this pallet, as if braving an arctic winter. The hearth was full of cold, gray ash.

There was a book lying open on the pallet, one that its discoverer thought oddly cold to the touch. The book was very old, and most of it written in Quenya, such that there are very few here who can read it. But the final sentence written in the book was written in Adûnaic, and reads as follows:

_‘The mouth has snapped shut, and we are cast down into the belly of the beast.’_

**Author's Note:**

> *Those who listen to _The Magnus Archives_ can probably guess which element in this fic was inspired by it.
> 
>  **Tyelkormo** —Celegorm
> 
>  **Adûnaim** —an Adûnaic name for the people of Númenor (Adûnaic)  
>  **Anadûnê** —Númenor (Adûnaic)  
>  **Araman** —possibly meaning ‘Beside Aman’ or ‘Outside Aman’ (Quenya); a barren land in the north of Aman, on the coast between the Pelóri mountain range and the Sundering Sea. It reaches northwards up to the Helcaraxë.  
>  **Endóre** —Middle-Earth (Quenya)  
>  **Eruhíni** —‘Children of Ilúvatar’ (Quenya)  
>  **Falmari** —those among the Teleri who completed the journey to Aman; the name is derived from the Quenya falma, '[crested] wave.'  
>  **Helcaraxë** —the Grinding Ice (Quenya); the bridge of ice between Araman and Middle-Earth in the far north of the world. Morgoth and Ungoliant escaped to Middle-Earth by this road after destroying the Two Trees. Later, after the burning of the ships at Losgar, the Ñoldorin exiles abandoned on the other side of the sea traveled to Middle-Earth by this road at great risk to themselves.  
>  **Iathrim** —the Sindar of Doriath


End file.
